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A few years ago, Andrew Fox was struck by a transcendently bad idea. He would turn the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional, inclusive, and inane. Fox was a theatre-loving composer who had grown dispirited by the industry in general, and by humorless and preachy productions in particular. His gloomy outlook was not improved by his habit of spending hours on social media, which is where, in 2022, he came across a debate over whether or not Anne Frank was the beneficiary of “white privilege”—notwithstanding her Jewish identity, for which she was hunted down by Nazi soldiers and shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died, in 1945, at the age of fifteen. Like many viral online debates, this one was rather one-sided: most people seemed to agree that the idea was ridiculous, including the celebrity-gossip site TMZ, which covered the controversy and rendered its own dismissive verdict in the form of a woozy-face emoji.

Even so, Fox couldn’t shake the thought of a show that tried to update Frank’s story for modern political sensitivities. He wrote a rap, heavily indebted to Eminem’s “8 Mile,” in the voice of a feisty teen-ager whose hip-hop bravado has been dampened only slightly by the fact that she and her family happen to be crammed into an attic, hoping not to be discovered and killed: “When this hiding’s over, I’ll be in demand, with my prose tighter / And if survival’s not the plan, I’ll be a ghost writer.” He decided that his Anne Frank would not be white but rather Latina, having grown up in “the barrios of Frankfurt,” with a closeted father who loves to remind people that he is neurodivergent; she has a crush on Peter, a fellow-refugee whose gender identity is the subject of an inspirational acoustic-guitar ballad called “Non-Binary.” Fox kept writing songs and began to enlist collaborators, all of whom had to decide whether they wanted to risk their careers by signing on. One actor sent the script to his manager and got a note back warning that the show “could end up feeling more like a satire of progressive theater than an actual reimagining of Anne Frank’s story.” The manager was not at all wrong, but the actor committed to the show anyway.

In defiance of cautious theatre professionals—and, perhaps, of common sense—“Slam Frank” lurched to life. Fox arranged a top-secret table read, booked under a pseudonym, in order to limit the blowback if people hated it. He staged a one-off performance and then, in September, “Slam Frank” began a developmental run at Asylum NYC, a comedy theatre on East Twenty-fourth Street, which has a hundred and fifty seats surrounding a small stage. For months, Fox had been building a following on social media by posting a series of deadpan updates on Instagram and TikTok, from a dedicated “Slam Frank” account. When one user asked why on earth Anne Frank would speak Spanish, Fox wrote, with mock exasperation, “Because she’s an immigrant?” When another noted that one of the songs sounded a bit like Kanye West, who had recently added to his infamy by promoting a website that sold swastika T-shirts, Fox replied, “Unfortunately we wrote this song BEFORE we discovered that he is monetizing and appropriating Jain & Hindu symbols.” Just about every day, when people wondered if it was all a put-on, Fox responded with a joke that turned out not to be a joke after all, and which turned into a kind of mission statement: “ ‘Slam Frank’ is a real musical.”

On a recent Wednesday night, a line of cheerful theatregoers stretched down Twenty-fourth Street, waiting to be inspected by a guard with a handheld metal detector. As far as Fox knows, the security protocol has not yet foiled any planned incidents of violence, but a guard did once tell Fox, who also plays a role in the musical, that his own performance could use a bit more “heart.” (Fox decided that he agreed, and tweaked his approach accordingly.) Onstage and off, Fox is a restless and voluble presence, the kind of guy who seems to be pacing back and forth even when he is sitting still. Aside from the guard’s performance note, the reaction to “Slam Frank” has been generally positive—surprisingly so, perhaps, given Fox’s evident desire to annoy just about everyone. The New York Times described the show as “clever” and “gleefully provocative”; the London Times called it “the most brilliant new musical in New York City,” and voiced a hope that it could “save Broadway.” The bad reviews helped, too: Fox News called it “grotesque,” and someone started an online petition that labelled the production “deeply offensive” and demanded that it be cancelled; the petition provided a useful suggestion of controversy, even though fewer than a thousand people signed it. “Slam Frank” was originally booked for three weeks, which turned into four months; it is now scheduled to run through December 28th. In the lobby before the show, people could buy drinks and merchandise, including a “PROBLEM ATTIC” baseball cap and a “Slam Frank” yarmulke, which had required an expedition to a Judaica shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “I want the ‘Slam Frank’ yarmulke to be the single best yarmulke anybody’s ever owned,” Fox told me, sounding a bit like the bumptious artistic director of a regional theatre company—which is, in fact, the role that Fox was playing in the show.

This character was Fox’s major concession to respectability. Joel Sinensky, a screenwriter and playwright, and a childhood friend of Fox’s, wrote the book, and they agreed that “Slam Frank” should be a meta-musical. It opens with a memorably pretentious speech from an artistic director who is also a scapegoat; audiences can blame the character, not the creators, for anything that offends them. (Mel Brooks did something similar in “The Producers,” which had a plot that gave viewers license to laugh at “Springtime for Hitler,” the gloriously misguided mini-musical at the heart of the show.) Even so, Fox knew that he didn’t want to rely on easy punch lines about safe spaces and trigger warnings. “The last good trigger-warning joke was made in, like, 2017,” he told me. He wanted audiences to be carried away, despite themselves, by the sight and sound of the attic-bound characters singing, “Outside, they’re fighting a war / But, in here, we’re fighting expectations!” That meant making sure that the songs didn’t play merely as jokes. “If I’m writing this big queer anthem, I need the first three minutes of it, at least—before it goes off the rails—to be something that a bunch of queer teen-agers would want to perform in their college theatre program,” Fox says.

During the rehearsal process, Sam LaFrage, the director, and the cast sometimes joked about “Slam Frank, Jr.”—a lighthearted version of the show poking fun at the excesses of identity politics. And, for about eighty minutes, that is more or less what audiences get. But then there is a well-executed pivot, and the dark humor suddenly goes pitch-black; because some of the seats are practically on the stage, you can watch attendees instinctively cover their mouths as they figure out what’s happening. “Slam Frank” turns out to be a surprisingly ambitious show, and one of Fox’s ambitions is to keep audiences from getting too comfortable. “There was a moment when they stopped laughing,” Fox said, with satisfaction, not long after the final bow, as the audience members staggered back into the lobby, more subdued than they had been a couple hours earlier.

In Fox’s telling, his theatrical history has been one disillusionment after another. He is thirty-nine, and was raised in the Los Angeles suburbs, in a Jewish family that had a dramatic streak: his great-grandfather was Charles Newman, a songwriter whose hits included “Sweethearts on Parade”; his grandfather was David Ellis, a writer and radio actor who, in 1952, was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked whether he was a member of the Communist Party. (Ellis refused to answer.) Fox was a theatre kid in high school, a capable pianist, and a pretty good actor, although he soon gave up on the idea of making a living onstage. He worked as an orchestrator and teacher while developing projects of his own, but he was starting to feel alienated from the theatre industry, which he thought was becoming more interested in sending messages than telling stories. “Everything I was watching assumed that the audience felt a certain way,” he says, recalling in particular a production that seemed to him like a “Hamilton” ripoff, and that seemed to be premised on the idea that everyone in the audience shared the creators’ critique of America. “I just kept thinking, I don’t think I’m ever going to see anything good, ever again,” he remembers.

Of course, Fox wouldn’t have been so annoyed if he didn’t love musical theatre so much in the first place, and “Slam Frank” is full of references designed to amuse his fellow-aficionados. A roving camera, projecting footage to an onstage screen, evokes the work of Jamie Lloyd, the British director known for his love of video; the grand finale, “Justice,” borrows from “Keep Marching,” a song in Shaina Taub’s “Suffs,” the recent musical tribute to the women’s-suffrage movement. “Progress is possible, not guaranteed,” the cast sings, quoting Taub’s lyrics, although by this point in the show Fox’s audience will probably not be inclined to take advice from anyone onstage. One important influence is Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose voice is echoed not just in the earnest and intricate rapping but in the show’s Latin fantasia, which will remind many audience members of “In the Heights,” Miranda’s musical set in the Dominican American neighborhood of Washington Heights. (A seat near the back of the room, half-hidden behind a column, has been permanently reserved for Miranda, in case he ever wants to witness what he has wrought.) Another just-as-important precursor is “Book of Mormon,” the determinedly offensive musical that became an unlikely Broadway hit, in 2011, and which is still playing today. PJ Adzima, one of the producers of “Slam Frank,” spent years playing Elder McKinley in “Book of Mormon,” and he thinks audiences are ready to be scandalized in a new and slightly different way. “ ‘Slam Frank’ is like discovering plutonium,” he told me. “If we can harness this, it’s a nuclear reactor, and we can go to the stars. If not, it’s Chernobyl.”

On social media, Fox loves to lampoon the theatre world’s obsession with identity-based casting. (When one commenter suggested casting Idris Elba in the role of Anne Frank, he responded, “We don’t approve of a cis man playing Anne Frank.”) But, in real life, he seems to practice what he does not preach: in casting his main character, he put out a call for a “Latina” actor with “excellent rapping skills,” and eventually he found Olivia Bernábe, a queer Mexican American actor who uses they/them pronouns, and who brings astonishing energy and unexpected sympathy to the role of Anne Frank, also known as Anita Franco. Bernábe saw some of Fox’s videos online, and auditioned for the role just for fun. “I read the script, and it actually wasn’t offensive in the ways I thought it was going to be,” Bernábe told me. “As a Latine person, I was able to laugh at it.” Anya van Hoogstraten plays Anne’s older sister, Margot, who is pious and quiet, at least at first, although her vision of Jewish identity eventually scrambles the play’s moral framework. Van Hoogstraten is not Jewish, and she spent a week asking people she knew whether or not it was a good idea to portray a Jewish character in a potentially incendiary production. Once she signed on, Fox told her to prepare for some online backlash, and he assigned her some reading, including “People Love Dead Jews,” by the Jewish scholar Dara Horn, which includes a chapter about the way that Anne Frank’s story has been reduced to a blandly universal tale of good and evil.

Just about everyone involved with the production seems to agree that a show like “Slam Frank” probably couldn’t have been mounted a few years ago, when cultural discourse was dominated by arguments over diversity and representation. At that time, creators who didn’t want to be accused of racism or some other ism tended to make sure that the bumbling white guy was always the butt of the joke, but in “Slam Frank” the designated scapegoat—the artistic director—remains largely offstage. Among the main characters, Peter’s sexist father is not much more clueless than Anne’s mother, who happens to be a fierce Black feminist, or Anne herself, who at one point declares, “I can no longer tell my story using the language of colonizers. Instead, I will tell it in Spanish!” Fox talks about wanting the show to be “three-dimensional,” with characters that are vivid but also ambiguous. Some viewers have objected to the show’s refusal to make a plain distinction between punching up and punching down. In her generally positive review for the New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote that the show relied, “to an extent that may be unwise, on the audience’s presumption of its creators’ good faith.” In a funny way, though, “Slam Frank” has something in common with the approach that Fox is making fun of: it is, among other things, one creator’s apparent attempt to use musical theatre to make sense of something personal. Fox is Jewish, and for all the jokes about race and sex, gender and sexuality, the show is at its most scathing on the topic of Jewishness, an identity that reliably frustrates attempts to turn social questions into a simple matter of up and down.

One Friday afternoon before showtime, members of the cast were sitting in the theatre, talking about how there are two specific moments in the show when audience members sometimes walk out. “I love it, in a weird, twisted way,” Alex Lewis, who is a cast member and a producer of the show, told me. (He’s the one who gets to sing “Non-Binary.”) “There are parts of the show that are meant to not make you feel happy.”

Austen Horne, the Black woman who plays Anne’s mother, Edith, wasn’t so gleeful. “Not every offended person is created equal,” she said, quietly. When people talk about the value of offensive art, they’re usually talking about art that offends other people, like “Book of Mormon,” with its affectionate mockery of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (And, for that matter, its slightly less affectionate mockery of Uganda.) But Horne, whose big moment in the show is a marvellously overcooked slam poem about the patriarchy, said that she was still figuring out how to balance her enthusiasm for the production with the knowledge that many of the “young, queer, radical, leftist people” in her life felt differently. “I’ve had friends come to a show where there’s a standing ovation, and my friends are the only people not standing, because they’re so offended by some of the things that have happened,” she said. “It’s taking a strain on a lot of my personal relationships, and I don’t know what it will bring for my career in the future. But I’ve been so grateful to be a part of it.”

As it happened, the audience that night was unusually jubilant, which seemed to be good news for the producers, who are hoping that, sometime next year, “Slam Frank” might move to a bigger theatre—someplace a bit closer to Broadway in scale, if not location. It is difficult, though not quite impossible, for a sharply satirical production to find a home among the blockbusters: “Book of Mormon” was co-written by Robert Lopez, who previously co-wrote “Avenue Q,” which also conquered Broadway. And, in 2022, “Titaníque,” a semi-improvised homage to Céline Dion, opened at Asylum NYC and transferred to the Daryl Roth Theatre, before spawning a number of successful productions around the world. A bigger venue might also supply “Slam Frank” with an intriguing new ingredient: audience members who have no idea what they’re in for. For now, most of the people who make their way to Twenty-fourth Street seem to relish the sense that they are witnessing something that is both hugely entertaining and somewhat taboo. When the evening’s performance was over, van Hoogstraten was talking about the palpable discomfort some people feel when she delivers her dramatic monologue, but she was interrupted by an exuberant fan. “I just want to say, I could not stop laughing, anytime you did anything,” he said.

His date agreed. “We’ll tell all our friends,” she said.

Backstage, Fox was already thinking about the next round of revisions he wanted to make. First, though, he would need to step back from playing the artistic director to give himself some free time. And, before that, he would need to rest his body and voice for the weekend’s performances. For all the talk about cancellation, Fox says that he never really worried about what the reaction to this production might be; at a small theatre, like Asylum NYC, he could afford to fail. But if “Slam Frank” transfers to a bigger room, then Fox will get a chance to find out how much of a gap remains between his sensibilities and those of the theatregoing public. One of his childhood mentors was Sherry Coben, the creator of the CBS sitcom “Kate & Allie,” who lived nearby when Fox was growing up; not long before she died, last year, Fox played her a couple of the “Slam Frank” songs. “They made her laugh,” he remembered. “She said, ‘Andrew has so much talent—it would be great if he put it toward something that somebody would enjoy.’ ” ♦

On Tuesday, November 11th—two days after eight Democratic senators split with their party and voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown—Mikie Sherrill, the governor-elect of New Jersey, was sitting in a diner in Montclair, in the northeast suburbs of the state. “Well, I’m really upset, so my take on it was, ‘What the actual fuck?’ ” she told me. Sherrill, a four-term Democratic congresswoman who was first elected when she flipped a conservative U.S. House district in the anti-Donald Trump wave of 2018, said she had campaigned all year to “say no” to the notion that Trump was leaving his opponents deflated and powerless. She went on to defeat her Republican rival, the former state legislator and three-time gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, by fourteen points—and watched Democrats win by similarly large margins in Virginia, California, and New York. The idea behind her campaign, she continued, had been “to finally galvanize what I think of as Democrats, meaning the working-class suburbanites, working people in the cities, in a powerful way so we can actually fight back. And then, not even a week later, to see the Senate fuck that all up?”

Sherrill, a fifty-three-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot, litigator, and prosecutor, is not primarily known for provoking her own party. For months this year, the word about her campaign, which she oriented around promising to fight rising energy costs and relentlessly tying her opponent to Trump, was that it was “milquetoast,” as one national progressive activist called it this fall. She had a record of questioning the Party line—she repeatedly voted against Nancy Pelosi leading the Democrats in the House, arguing that the Party was ready for a new generation of leaders, and she was one of the first elected officials to call for Joe Biden to drop his reëlection campaign after his debate against Trump last year. But the concern was that Sherrill didn’t represent anything new in a state that was calling for change. Four years earlier, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, won reëlection by just three points; last year, Trump got within six points of Kamala Harris, the closest Presidential result the state had seen in more than thirty years. Sherrill was a compelling—and tough—character, but she had risen to prominence in Trump’s first term as a face of the suburban #Resistance.

After her win, Sherrill soaked in the positive feelings, at least until the news landed from Washington. When I asked how she proposed fixing her party’s evident problems, she looked at me as if it were obvious: “One presents a model of bold leadership and a take-no-prisoners attitude in serving people.” Her political operation has swiftly tried to insure that she is treated as a nationally important figure. The day after we talked, Sherrill’s campaign manager, Alex Ball, circulated a memo offering “advice for campaigns heading into the 2026 midterms,” which included, “Do not let the press and pundits write last year’s news without a challenge. At every juncture of this campaign, Mikie Sherrill was underestimated.” The bravado is, at some level, understandable. In the final days of the campaign, one of Sherrill’s vanquished primary opponents had touted a survey showing a basically even race, and Politico’s “New Jersey Playbook” newsletter author, Matt Friedman, wrote that, though his head foresaw a Sherrill victory, his “gut” was with Ciattarelli. Yet Sherrill shifted every county in the state to the left and even flipped traditional Republican strongholds such as Morris County. She also appeared to reverse Trump’s gains among Latino voters, winning heavily Hispanic Passaic County by fifteen points, after Trump had carried it by three points last year. When Sherrill won, Democrats flipped five Assembly seats, giving them a super-majority and extending the Party’s considerable control over state lawmaking.

A week later, Sherrill attributed the skepticism to the political atmosphere when the race got going in earnest early this year. “Trump moved really quickly, so there was this toxic brew of despair and panic.” The outcome, she continued, had been constant second-guessing. “When we talked about affordability, people said we didn’t get what was going on. When we talked about Trump, always with respect to affordability, people said we talked about Trump too much.” On the trail, Sherrill promised to freeze utility rates, as Ciattarelli blamed Murphy, who was concluding his eighth year in office, and Democrats for high prices. (It had been six decades since New Jersey had voted the same party into the governor’s mansion in three straight elections.) The contest remained in a sort of holding pattern until the fall, when Ciattarelli revealed that Sherrill hadn’t been allowed to walk at her Naval Academy graduation. She maintained that this was because she hadn’t turned in classmates who were involved in a cheating scandal, and she then criticized the Trump Administration for including her personal information like her Social Security number when releasing her military records. In October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli, the former owner of a medical-publishing company, of having “killed tens of thousands of people” by printing “propaganda” about opioid safety. (Ciattarelli said he would sue Sherrill over the claim. She kept criticizing his work on opioids but didn’t repeat the accusation on the trail.)

It was hardly inspiring stuff, but from the Democratic perspective it didn’t have to be, as long as Trump’s approval rating continued to sink and Sherrill kept advertising the connection between Ciattarelli and the President. Ciattarelli never explicitly based his campaign on Trump, focussing instead on local issues such as property taxes and school funding. But he welcomed national MAGA influencers like Vivek Ramaswamy to stump for him and refused on multiple occasions to distance himself from the President. At one debate, Ciattarelli said that he would give Trump an “A grade”; he also would not criticize Trump’s abrupt decision to pull funding for the sixteen-billion-dollar Gateway Program, a railway-infrastructure project that would have eased travel between New Jersey and New York City for hundreds of thousands of commuters. He tried arguing that he would be in a better position to negotiate with the Trump Administration and complained that Sherrill was too focussed on the White House. “If you get a flat tire on the way home tonight, she’s going to blame it on President Trump,” he took to saying at rallies.

Trump, however, was a pressing topic for the voters whom Sherrill was pursuing. Josh Gottheimer, a northern New Jersey congressman who ran against Sherrill in the primary on the strength of his bipartisan legislative record, spent much of the summer and fall campaigning for her and found talk of the President’s policies unavoidable. Gottheimer heard often from voters about Trump’s tariffs, he said, but their concerns about the shutdown were even more immediate. “He campaigned so much on working-class people and then just gave them the finger,” Gottheimer told me.

“What you’re looking at is a state that’s not necessarily Democratic anymore, so much as it is nationalized,” Julie Roginsky, a longtime Democratic strategist in New Jersey, said. The size of Sherrill’s win impressed politicos from Mahwah to Cape May, but after a few days I started to hear an alternative view, too. Trump’s approval numbers were scraping the low forties nationally and mid-thirties in New Jersey, and the shutdown was even less popular. Sherrill’s win may be offering inspiration for a national party in need of it. But, Roginsky—a strong Sherrill supporter—said, “I hope she doesn’t think that she won by fourteen points just because of Mikie Sherrill. I hope she understands that she won by fourteen points also because of Donald Trump.”

Montclair, where Sherrill lives, is an upscale commuter town known locally for its suburban-yuppie politics. When she walked into the mostly empty diner where we met, the server hugged her and asked for a photo, and a few minutes later another woman started upon seeing her through the window, and gave her a thumbs-up. I asked Sherrill if she was being greeted like that more often since her win, and she arched an eyebrow: “Yeah, this is Montclair,” she said. She’d won Essex County, which includes Newark, by fifty-four points the previous week.

Sherrill claimed a mandate as soon as the size of her victory became clear, but she has largely avoided filling in the details of what it’s for. Day One will entail “declaring a state of emergency on utility costs and freezing rate hikes,” she has said repeatedly. “The reason I took that on was I needed a way to communicate to people: I’m not just wah-wah-wah-wah,” she told me, imitating a droning politician. “I’m not just going to go down into Trenton, in the bowels of the statehouse, and have some conversations about the ten-year plan. That’s not going to cut it for people and the way they’re feeling right now.” She has also talked about going after drug-pricing middlemen, increasing assistance for first-time homebuyers, and working to restore the Gateway funding. But if the first question Sherrill has faced is what, exactly, she hopes to do, the second—and more pointed—is how she intends to do it. Though Trenton is heavily Democratic, the statehouse remains divided by regional and labor factions and studded with entrenched power brokers who are unafraid—even eager—to show off and publicly leverage their influence, even when it makes life hard for their own party’s leaders. (The South Jersey boss George Norcross, for one, effectively stalled out Murphy’s first-term agenda for months when Murphy tried to overhaul a Norcross-favored tax-incentive program in and around Camden.) When I pointed out that the actual job likely required at least some work in Trenton’s bowels, and some time spent negotiating, Sherrill seemed unmoved. “I just don’t think the sense of ‘It’s really time-consuming’ is working for anybody right now, because Trump has shown it doesn’t have to be. If we’re not willing to move fast, if we’re not willing to take on tough structural issues, we’re going to get played.”

One worry of longtime pols in the state is that Sherrill’s ranks of advisers do not include many of the expected names—few have written bills or wrangled over bond issuances in New Jersey. Ball, a former national campaign operative and chief of staff to a Colorado congressman before she ran Sherrill’s office in D.C., is now her top staffer in Trenton. Ball suggested that their theory of making policy in the statehouse would simply look different from that of previous governors. “Obviously Mikie had really long coattails,” she said, so legislators will “understand that she’s coming in with this vision and agenda that the majority of the state is bought into.” Current officeholders, Ball continued, are “gonna have to figure out how to work with us, because we know that the voters are expecting progress, and I think, you know, people are going to be smart to join the team.” This includes, she said, Republicans, who hold a handful of state Senate seats that will be up for grabs in next fall’s election in areas that Sherrill won.

Sherrill has shown little patience for the idea that she needs to articulate a grand philosophical vision. Instead, her pragmatic, slightly ruthless conception of the job recalls the “get shit done” campaign that got Josh Shapiro elected in Pennsylvania, and Gretchen Whitmer’s “fix the damn roads” in Michigan. When I asked Sherrill which state executives she saw modelling her preferred approach, she immediately pointed to Shapiro, noting how, in 2023, he’d led the reconstruction of a stretch of I-95 in less than two weeks, rather than the predicted six months. The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, had also caught her eye by fighting back against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s attempts to release insurance companies from paying for vaccines. In practice, Healy’s maneuver looked less like picking a national fight than taking advantage of local rules: she ordered insurance carriers operating in Massachusetts to cover vaccines recommended by the state’s own health department. “I think there are a lot of governors who are making movements in a pretty critical time in a way that feels to me very different from what’s going on in Washington,” Sherrill said.

Outside the diner, it was starting to snow, and Sherrill was soon due at a Veterans Day event in nearby Livingston. She had to meet with local grandees, name a staff, and think about when she’d get back to Congress—to vote, to give one last speech encouraging her colleagues to embrace more forceful resistance against Trump, and to formally advise that she planned to resign her seat the following week. Her mind was clearly still on the coming end of the shutdown. “Washington just seems like they can’t get out of their own way. They can’t see beyond procedural tactics on the fucking floor,” she said. “When we’re in a time like this, to be, like, ‘Oh, I’m an appropriator, so I just need to make sure blah-blah-blah-blah’— if you want to be an accountant, be an accountant. If you want to be a leader, be a leader.” ♦

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Since it was penned more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has been in production nearly continuously, and has been adapted in many ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider why this story of a brooding young prince has continued to speak to audiences throughout the centuries. They discuss the new film “Hamnet,” directed by Chloé Zhao, which recasts the writing of “Hamlet” as Shakespeare’s response to the death of his child; Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”; Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet” (2000), which presents the protagonist as a melancholy film student home from college; and other adaptations. What accounts for this story’s hold over audiences, centuries after it was written? “I think it endures because every generation has its version of the incomprehensible,” Cunningham says. “It’s not just death—it’s politics, it’s society. Everybody has to deal with their own version of ‘This does not make sense and yet it is.’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Hamnet” (2025)
“Hamnet,” by Maggie O’Farrell
“Hamlet,” by William Shakespeare
Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” (1996)
Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet” (2000)
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1990)
John Gielgud’s “Hamlet” (1964)
Robert Icke’s “Hamlet” (2017, 2022)
“Every Generation Gets the Shakespeare It Deserves” by Drew Lichtenberg (The New York Times)
“Hamlet and His Problems” by T. S. Eliot

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.